At America today, Kevin Clarke writes,
The [U.S. Catholic] bishops also remain deeply concerned regarding the Health and Human Services mandate that will force employers to provide health coverage that entails payment for abortifacients, contraceptives, and sterilizations, even if doing so violates the employers’ deeply-held religious or moral beliefs.
I am under the impression that the Affordable Care Act does not include coverage of abortifacients in healthcare plans. The HHS fact sheet on what the Affordable Care Act does and does not do explicitly states, "Abortifacient drugs are not included" in the new healthcare plan.
And so I'm puzzled by Kevin Clarke's bald, unambiguous statement that the Health and Human Services mandate "will force employers to provide health coverage that entails payment for abortifacients, contraceptives, and sterilizations." Implicitly, this statement accuses the federal government of lying to the American public about the provisions of the new healthcare plan.
I am assuming that, when he maintains that the federal government is forcing employers to pay for abortifacients through the ACA, he intends to say that the morning-after pill works as an abortifacient. But as his previous essay in America about the decision of the German Catholic bishops' conference to permit the administration of the morning-after pill in cases of rape states, "emerging scientific evidence" indicates that the morning-after pill does not work as an abortifacient. It works, instead, as a contraceptive, and as Mr. Clarke rightly notes in this essay, Sister Carol Keehan, president of the Catholic Health Association, has noted that emerging scientific evidence about the morning-after pill, as do the German bishops in their decision to approve its use in cases of rape.
Mr. Clarke goes on to write,
The confusion begins in the term abortifacient itself. The Food and Drug Administration holds that Plan B and ellaOne are not abortifacients. That’s because to the government both drugs work before a pregnancy begins, whether that means suspending ovulation or interfering with the implantation of an embryo in the uterus. But to the church, the latter possibility constitutes an abortive feature, and consequently church officials consider Plan B a possible and ellaOne a probable abortifacient.
But now some researchers insist that recent studies have demonstrated that Plan B does not act as an abortifacient, either according to the church’s or the government’s understanding of the term, and that the same is likely true of ellaOne. They have urged a labeling change to reflect that view. Erica V. Jefferson, an F.D.A. public affairs deputy director acknowledges that "the emerging data on Plan B suggest that it does not inhibit implantation." She adds, "Less is known about ella, however, some data suggest that it also does not inhibit implantation.
As Linda Greenhouse notes for the New York Times, when federal Judge Edward R. Korman overturned the HHS ban on keeping the morning-after pill a prescription-only drug for girls younger than 17 last April, he did so by looking carefully at the best scientific evidence available about how the morning-after pill works. Greenhouse writes,
Judge Korman begins where discussions of emergency contraception should begin but almost never do: by defining the drug and how it works. Those challenging the requirement for employer-provided health insurance to cover birth control almost invariably train their attack on emergency contraception by calling it an "abortion pill" or abortifacient and asserting a religious objection to abortion.
But Judge Korman, citing a Government Accountability Office report that collected scientific articles on the mechanism of levonorgestrel, the synthetic hormone that is the drug’s active ingredient, demonstrates that Plan B is not about abortion. It immobilizes sperm and prevents or delays ovulation. In other words, when taken shortly after unprotected intercourse, Plan B works as birth control, by preventing rather than terminating a pregnancy. (The F.D.A.-approved label for Plan B raises the possibility that the drug might also work by preventing a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterus to begin a pregnancy, but the National Institutes of Health has removed language raising this prospect from its Web site, and the N.I.H. biochemist in charge of research on contraception has said the language should also be taken off the label. Judge Korman called the prospect that Plan B might permit fertilization but prevent implantation "scientifically unsupported speculation.")
So: an increasing body of scientific evidence, which is now regarded as conclusive by most scientists worth their salt, and is being cited in court decisions, strongly suggests that the morning-after pill is not an abortifacient. It does not work by preventing the implantation of a fertilized ovum. The Catholic bishops' conference of Germany accepts and cites this evidence in its decision to approve of the use of the morning-after pill in cases of rape.
Why, then, does Kevin Clarke write that the Affordable Care Act "will force employers to provide health coverage that entails payment for abortifacients, contraceptives, and sterilizations," when the ACA does not include coverage of abortifacient drugs, and when he himself notes in a previous America article about the morning-after pill that "emerging scientific evidence" demonstrates that the morning-after pill is not an abortifacient?
Mr. Clarke might accurately have written, "In the view of some people opposed to the ACA, it will force employers to provide health coverage that entails payment for abortifacients, contraceptives, and sterilizations." Or he might have written, "Contrary to emerging scientific evidence and the consensus of most researchers familiar with the topic, who recognize that the morning-after pill is not an abortifacient, the U.S. Catholic bishops continue to maintain that the ACA will force employers to provide health coverage that entails payment for abortifacients, contraceptives, and sterilizations."
He did not write either of these things. He wrote, instead,
The [U.S. Catholic] bishops also remain deeply concerned regarding the Health and Human Services mandate that will force employers to provide health coverage that entails payment for abortifacients, contraceptives, and sterilizations, even if doing so violates the employers’ deeply-held religious or moral beliefs.
This is deplorable journalism. It's sloppy. It is propaganda masquerading as reporting. It places Mr. Clarke's essay, and America itself, at the service of the USCCB in a propagandistic way that undercuts the credibility of a journal whose mission is supposedly to serve the church by fostering open discussion of theological and moral issues, by pointing readers to the best theological statements to be found about particular issues, and so forth.
Shame on America for letting itself be used in this unconscionable way, in the bishops' continued partisan political war against the Obama administration and the Affordable Care Act. American Catholics deserve better from you.
